


Just To Sit Outside Your Door

by lllookalive



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 05:43:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19419643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lllookalive/pseuds/lllookalive
Summary: Crowley can remember the...well maybe not thefirsttime, but at least he can remember the sensation of changing his mind before his Fall with the fresh realization ofOh, shit, no good will come of this.Something had settled heavily in his soul, where everything before had been simple, buoyant, and effervescent.He would realize later - too much later - that this was the weight of responsibility for his own choices. It was, if you asked Crowley, one of the rudest cosmic jokes.





	Just To Sit Outside Your Door

He doesn’t remember the name he’d gone by. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t even remember whether he’d even been a _he_. Memories of Heaven as a sort of overall concept are deliberately fresh, like a pointed warning. A _best not complain, it could always be worse_ reminder with all of Hell’s sledgehammer subtlety. Any remaining personal details, however, are vague and muddled and all sort of crumble together like rockfall at the base of a cliff. The harder he tries to pick one out of the jumble, the more jumbled they all get. 

In truth, it’s probably for the best. Even if Crowley can’t get a solid grip on them, the semantics leave a tinny aftertaste, like stale ozone in the back of his throat. 

It took awhile -millennia, probably? - but fragments came back. Come back, still, once in awhile. Think about the worst hangover you’ve ever had, stumbling through the fog following a night spent truly off your trolley blackout sozzled, and now multiply it by a few thousand eons. Just sitting at a cafe, minding your own business over a coffee, and whoop— another flash of white wings and devastatingly embarrassing open-toed sandals, being handed your sixth fussy little memo outlining the final adjustments to a star-system you thought was perfectly well done and dusted five fussy little memos ago. 

Hang it all.

Which, actually, he (she? They..? That part’s never bothered to come back, so he tends to default.) did. Or, not _all_ of it, but he did help hang a great deal of the outer cosmos. He remembers that much, anyway, even if his name’s probably been stricken from the records. 

Wankers.

Copyright law is a human invention.

Crowley and Aziraphale ride the bus back to London. Aziraphale frets quietly, fingers curling and uncurling in his lap, as his shoulder where it’s pressed against Crowley’s is tense and rigid. 

“Nothing we can do now, but wait,” Crowley tells him bracingly. Apparently this doesn’t have the intended comforting effect, however, because Aziraphale just makes a pinched face, sighs, and stares out the window at the passing dark suburbs. 

Crowley grits his teeth, leaning back until his head thunks against the headrest, and produces a packet of biscuits from, presumably, inside his blazer. He hands it over wordlessly. 

“Oh my dear, how thoughtful.” Aziraphale tears open the wrapper, its crinkling only somewhat covering Crowley’s perfunctory gagging noise of dissent. “Care to share?”

He takes one for something to do, breaking off a corner and watching it crumble between his fingers. The packet he’d handed over had been full of posh matcha-flavored things dipped in dark chocolate. Indulgent and bitter. In Aziraphale’s hand, it’s turned into a brightly-colored tin of assorted butter biscuits. The one Crowley’s picked has got rainbow sprinkles. He quits fidgeting with it and takes a bite, just to stop it looking at him. 

They ride on in silence. Halfway through the tin of biscuits, Aziraphale produces a thermos of tea and an extra mug, which miraculously doesn’t spill so much as a drop, despite the increasing frequency of potholes and speed bumps the closer they get to the city. The tension between them also seems to build with each passing mile, although Crowley can’t be sure if he’s just reading too much into things. 

_You can stay at my place...If you like._

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Of all the twatty things to say. No slick _Right, angel, come along. You’ve not got a choice in the matter._ Not even a good, old-fashioned tempting along the lines of, _I’ve conjured up a whole cupboard of your favorite single-malt, and I might even let you compliment one of the ferns where it can hear you._

Not, of course, that Crowley’s spent something like the last 6,000 or so years considering the second-best way to convince Aziraphale to come home with him. (The very best way would involve Aziraphale coming up with the idea on his own, but if Crowley thinks too hard about how long that might take, he’s likely to reduce whatever he’s holding to ash.)

Except, as the bus pulls up at the curb outside Crowley’s flat, Aziraphale stands with him, brushing the biscuit crumbs from his trousers. “Shall we?”

“Erm.” Crowley realizes he must be staring, mouth open like a stunned trout, only when Aziraphale’s face falls.

“Oh goodness, of course, you were only being polite and I shouldn’t have—”

The word _polite_ brings Crowley back to himself with a snarl of indignation. “I was being nothing of the sort,” he hisses, with all the venom he can muster after a day like this one’s been. “Now move along before I change my mind.”

Crowley can remember the...well maybe not the _first_ time, but at least he can remember the sensation of changing his mind before his Fall with the fresh realization of _Oh, shit, no good will come of this._

Something had settled heavily in his soul, where everything before had been simple, buoyant, and effervescent. 

He would realize later - too much later - that this was the weight of responsibility for his own choices. It was, if you asked Crowley, one of the rudest cosmic jokes. 

He had found out later that demons, strictly speaking, don’t have free will. This is down in the manual much the same way as a human company might list out the dress code, or strongly advise against chewing gum while taking client phone calls. That is to say, the second you think you can bend the rules without being fired (literally, in this case), you do. 

Given the context, Crowley’s always just assumed the constant low-grade rule breaking was on brand with his overall demonic prerogative. He makes a point of changing his mind frequently, and whenever it most inconveniences others. In recent years, he’s had specifically good results with this when placing his order at coffee shops during the morning rush.

At least in Hell, things are a bit more straightforward. Heaven is the Ford Factory of free will, as in, you can have as sodding much of it as you like, so long as it’s _well-intentioned_.

And he had been, is the thing! Or, he’d thought so, anyway. The problem just comes down to whose definition of “well-intentioned” you go by. 

Time is a complex thing, particularly in the presence of an ostensibly all-knowing God. Earth being not even a twinkle in Her eye, memos and marching orders had already begun to circulate In Preparation. 

One caused quite a stir, handed off to Azreal with priority set to _pending_. It outlined an act called “killing” that was to be done to many things called “first borns” in a place to be called “Egypt.” All very new language that drew about a considerable amount of speculation until, as these things tend to, everyone’s attention was recaptured by other, more pressing things. 

It wasn’t until some time later that an addendum was handed around, defining quite a few new terms and concepts. 

Crowley, or whoever he’d had been at the time, read it, re-read it, and felt again the sensation of an uncomfortable weight settling deep down in his immortal soul. 

“It’s right here in the briefing!” 

Raising questions wasn’t encouraged, particularly with the higher-ups, but he couldn’t help himself. 

“Children: Tiny, young, innocent. To be protected at all costs.”

“Indeed,” said Uriel, squinting at the paper. “But I believe this was a meeting to discuss further adjustments to the nebula—”

“I did the reading. _Did anyone else do the reading?_ ”

Many delicate gilt eyebrows were raised.

“That’s just to say, I don’t even know what a child _is_ , really, but I know you’re not supposed to _kill them_. It makes some of the orders handed out lately a little contradictory, wouldn’t you say?”

The details grow fuzzy after that, but Crowley thinks he can remember high, hollow laughter, like the tinkle of breaking glass. 

The fact that Aziraphale’s never actually been over to his place hadn’t seemed weird until about thirty seconds ago, as Crowley unlocked the front door.

Suddenly, the keys feel clumsy in his hand, thinking of what was on the other side; the carefully curated, dimly lit ode to his own tastes. The big, empty spaces with sparse furnishings and a statue that he’d thought was _very funny at the time_. It’s essentially the antithesis to everything Aziraphale knows and loves, and probably the exact opposite of what he wants right now, in such a state after losing his precious book shop. 

Crowley freezes, key still in the lock as he has a quiet existential crisis, somewhere between _You’re a demon, all this thinking about someone else’s feelings is going to give you a rash_ , and MAYBE WE JUST SAY SOD IT AND GET A HOTEL.

“You alright?” Aziraphale asks, seemingly unaware of the screaming going on between Crowley’s ears. “Need a light?”

With a flick of his wrist, a ball of warm light shines down upon them in the narrow hall, emitting with it a vague sense of peace and immaculate tranquility.

Crowley eyes him suspiciously, but Aziraphale just beams and bounces a little on his toes as Crowley finally pushes the door open. 

“After you,” he tries, but Aziraphale is already beelining for the kitchen as if he’d been handed a map.

“Don’t suppose you have any— Oops! Oh dear.” There’s a muffled thud followed by a delicate shattering sound, but by the time Crowley catches up and flips on the lightswitch, Aziraphale is already replacing an innocently pristine Faberge egg on its stand atop a glass table. “Oh, that’s much better,” he says, beaming up at the light fixture as if it, too, is something miraculous. “Tea?”

“Shelf above the stove. Kettle’s right there.” 

Crowley leaves him to it, escaping to his bedroom to change.

He could just snap, of course. Metaphorically. Do a bit of magic and see his clothes back to their usual carefully-distressed state. Instead, he peels each rumpled, slightly sooty item off by hand, with each piece feeling further and further from the events of the day. It feels like a very mundane, human kind of thing to do, and as such, defiant in its own way. 

By the time he forces himself back out to the kitchen in a fresh set of clothes, Aziraphale has two mugs of tea waiting on the counter. 

“This one’s yours,” he says, holding out the darker one for Crowley to take. Then he returns to his own, stirring in cream and sugar from a service on the counter that Crowley’s certain hadn’t been there before Aziraphale’s arrival. 

Something inside him gives a great, aching heave. 

“Whiskey?” he says, hurriedly. He throws open cabinet doors, reaching in blindly and pulling out a bottle.

“Ooh, lovely!” Aziraphale exclaims, taking the offered bottle and pouring a careful measure into his cup before handing it back. Crowley is rather less fastidious about it, and his cup has to expand hastily to accommodate. “You have a sitting room somewhere around here, I take it?”

Crowley does now. 

As he leads Aziraphale through the maze of dim spaces, he runs the mental gymnastics of convincing a room otherwise inclined to be an office that it is now what he hopes is a comfortable sitting room. At least, it will be if it knows what’s good for it. 

Sure enough, there’s a warm fire crackling in a red marble hearth that could swear at last check that it was a large table. A sleek couch of dark leather sits in front of it, with ornate lions’ heads glinting at either armrest, trying not to appear equally confused and as if this is the sort of thing it does every day. There’s even a coffee table, and a rug. 

Aziraphale pauses in the doorway, taking it all in with that maddening hint of a smile playing at the corners of his lips. 

“What?” says Crowley, perhaps a shade more demanding than he’d really intended. “Stop smirking like that and come sit down, will you?”

He sets his tea and the bottle of whiskey down on the coffee table, and flings himself down upon the couch in what he hopes is an eloquent punctuation of just how very casual he finds this entire affair. 

“It’s all very...you, Crowley,” Aziraphale says, settling himself down neatly, teacup in hand. Somehow, for all the trials of the day, he hasn’t got a hair out of place. 

“Very me,” Crowley echoes. “Mm.” 

“Yes, indeed.” Aziraphale smiles warmly at him. Warm, and with a hint of something else. Something soft and sad and _old_. “And as much as I’d like to take this moment to relax and enjoy it, I rather think it’s time that we got ‘round to strategizing.”

Crowley’s brought back to himself to reality with a rude jolt. What with the more immediate crisis of Aziraphale’s arrival into his flat (he’d tried over the years to use phrases like “den of iniquity”, but “den” brought to mind all sorts of unpleasant smells, and he didn’t get up to so much iniquity as plant torture and the occasional viewing of televised golf, the idea for which had received a glowing commendation), he’d momentarily forgotten the much, much larger disaster at hand.

“Choose our faces wisely?” he quotes, eyebrows raised. “What is it, d’you suppose, that the old bat meant?”

“Perhaps we should show a little respect?” Aziraphale asks, in a pointed tone that Crowley secretly covets as being reserved only ever for himself. “I do believe she was trying to help, after all.”

“Funny way of doing it, though,” Crowley muses, letting his sunglasses slide a fraction of an inch down his nose as he stares into the fire. “Never just, ‘simply follow these instructions one through ten and you’re laughing’, is it? These human prophets always making you _work_ for it.”

“Yes, well,” Aziraphale says, in an _if you’re quite finished_ sort of voice. “I’ve been considering, and I think you might be overthinking a bit. That...that perhaps it’s just as simple as it sounds.”

“Angel,” says Crowley, “I don’t know what you…” And here he trails off, pausing and turning to stare back into the flames. The flames which leap and dance and which suddenly don’t looks so much warm and inviting as ominous, vaguely threatening. “Our faces. Hm.”

Aziraphale watches him expectantly.

“How would we even..?” Crowley starts, biting his lip and frowning. 

“It must be possible, or she wouldn’t have suggested it.” Aziraphale looks as though he’s trying as much to convince himself as Crowley.

But then a lead weight drops inside him and Crowley turns to glare at Aziraphale, hissing, “No. _No_ , never! Your lot’ve got no imagination, they’ll go for a good, old-fashioned immolation, no question. But my lot? Angel, you have no idea what they’ll do. We have no idea if it’ll be something as easy as—”

“Holy water?” Aziraphale suggests. “After the trouble you’ve caused, I hardly think they’ll want to give you any opportunity to stick around, even if it is to be tortured.”

Crowley considers this. On the one hand, Aziraphale’s point isn’t entirely lacking. On the other, “It’s not worth the risk. I couldn’t— I mean, if something were to— ” He makes a furious, exasperated sound, words failing in his throat. “No.”

“But this is what the prophecy says!” Aziraphale cries, brimming with his own frustration. He leans into Crowley’s space, who doesn’t have time to flinch back before Aziraphale’s hand is cupping his cheek, holding him fast with the sheer intensity of his gaze. “Better this risk than the alternative sure bet,” he whispers. 

His eyes are pleading, the same look that’s won him a thousand stain-removals; dozens of oyster dinners and crepe lunches, rescues from the guillotine, miraculous survival in blitzed churches, and desperate trips to metaphysical no-man’s land with the antichrist during the apocalyptic zero-hour. 

Crowley feels his resolve crumble.

Aziraphale whispers, “You’ve been rescuing me for six-thousand years.”

“Not really, I haven’t,” Crowley murmurs back. “You could have fixed it all yourself, well enough.” 

“That’s not entirely what I meant.”

Crowley’s heart is thundering within the confines of its cramped, wet, corporeal prison. It beats echoing something bigger, much bigger, that crashes against the fragile divide between planes. And in the echo, something like triumph.

Now is _really_ not the time.

Or.

Quite possibly.

Now is the _only_ time. 

He remembers his Fall. Jokes aside, that’s the only technical term for it, even if the sense of conviction hadn’t been strong as some. He remembers coming up for air and getting a lungful of ash and sulphur, and thinking, _Ah. Fuck._

Everything else after that had taken a while, pieced together amid the drudging day-by-day of figuring out how one goes about being a demon. It was a new concept, after all, and nobody really had a clear idea, regardless of what they might say later on. 

Lucifer took to his Dark Throne, and things fell into place from there in a damp, bureaucratic sort of way. 

Crowley - Crawley, at the time - hated damp. He wasn’t so much a fan of the fiery pits, either, as it turned out. Any of the extremes, really, just weren’t his bag. Not that he missed heaven, inasmuch as he could remember it. Sterile memories of sterile white walls and spotless surfaces and an impression of constant, low-grade frustration. Trying to remember more than that was like trying to find his way through a simultaneously cluttered and empty room. Everything just out of reach. 

It took him a few millennia to even realize that none of the other demons bother to try. Dagon and Beelzebub and Hastur and Ligur and all the others were just as content as anything in their new, festering skins. 

When the new project came round, he’s pretty sure they were all as glad to see him leave as he was to go. 

They got wind of the project through the usual backchannels, something big God was cooking up, probably to prove some cosmic point or other. The angels were already rallying, setting forth delegations and guards and all the usual pompous nonsense. 

Crawley didn’t spare too much thought on it until he overheard Dagon muttering to Beelzebub about the Angel of the Eastern Gate being a right useless ponce, and how whatever trouble they were planning would probably do best to happen closest to his watch. He slithered along in their wake, unnoticed. A little-appreciated fact about snakes is how they are remarkably adept eavesdroppers when the need calls for it.

“Anyone we know?” asked Beelzebub, without much real interest.

“Principality by the name of _Aziraphale_ ,” Dagon replied, paging through the file in their hand before handing it over. “Nobody worth knowing. Got a flaming sword, though. Look there.” 

They pointed to a detail down the page being scanned by Beelzebub, through the usual screen of buzzing. 

“Fancy.”

“I’ll say.”

“Think he knows how to use it?”

Dagon shrugged.

“Begging your pardon,” said Crawley, causing both heads to turn. 

Dagon and Beelzebub looked from him to one another and then back again, as if he were something that had just come unstuck from the bottom of one of their shoes. He was starting to get tired of that reception, feeling more and more that his hellish cohort hardly had room to judge anyone for something simple as snakeishness. 

Crawley drew himself up, swaying a little to meet the two pairs of eyes. “It’s only, I couldn’t help but hear you need some trouble caused in the new addition.” He jerked his head up, to indicate. 

And so he’d found himself slithering in a direction he never thought he’d see again: _Up_.

And after what amounted to the easiest job tempting that he could remember, Crawley stood next to the angel upon the high wall and stretched his wings and watched the storm roll in. 

Six-thousand years culminate in the gentle thud of Crowley’s teacup hitting the rug, and the sound of Aziraphale’s answering sigh of sympathy swallowed by Crowley’s mouth covering his own. In Crowley’s sunglasses getting tossed aside as Aziraphale climbs nearly into his lap. In his hands fumbling blindly until he locates that infernal bowtie, and tugging until it comes undone. 

It’s all so terribly, blissfully, _miraculously_ human. 

Crowley can remember creating Alpha Centauri, and a hundred thousand other star-systems across the cosmos. Bundling the live, superheated light between his hands until it quivered and burst forth, exploding against the darkness and leaving him thrumming to his core with chaotic energy. 

He hadn’t done it alone. 

They move to the bedroom after an ominous creak from the sofa, signaling that its component parts had about reached the limits of their imagination. 

Aziraphale seems to glow against the dark sheets, or maybe he really _is_ glowing; emitting a pearlescent sheen of giddy pleasure. His fingers leave a trail of sparks where they touch Crowley, and they both go still.

“Oh, my,” he breathes, and then does it again, and Crowley _moans_. 

The burn is sharp and sweet and lingers under Crowley’s skin even after Aziraphale’s moved on, exploring anything he can reach and leaving the room around them heavy as rain on a hot day. His legs sprawl wide, Aziraphale settling between them and kissing him again, deep and long and open-mouthed. 

The air around them crackles. Crowley’s pretty sure the whole fucking flat could burn down around them and he wouldn’t even notice, or care. 

“Very, ah, _corporeal_ , isn’t it?” Aziraphale sighs against his lips, blushing as if now, after everything, finding himself naked in Crowley’s bed, between Crowley’s legs, he’s suddenly remembered himself. “No wonder the humans make such a fuss.” 

Crowley slides a hand up the inside of his thigh. “Tell me what you want, angel.”

“I— _oh_ ,” Aziraphale gasps, shivering as Crowley’s hand moves higher. He looks down at Crowley with an expression of such exquisite yearning, of such tenderness, that Crowley thinks he can feel it take root inside himself, like a living, physical thing. He says, “Everything.”

With one slithering movement, Crowley has him on his back, mouths pressed together in another frenzied kiss. They’re starting to blur around the edges now, he can feel it, like a sense above taste lingering at the corners of his consciousness. A bright, vast, incandescent tide that swells with thrumming pleasure as he lets himself sink into it. Aziraphale is all around him, or maybe they’re all around each other. Hands and mouths and skin and sweat and these devastatingly fragile, human-shaped bodies - how has Crowley never realized just how much sensation they’re capable of? 

He does a sort of sinuous, fluid roll of his hips and Aziraphale gasps and makes a sound Crowley’s never heard before but immediately wants to hear again, and again, and again. Lights burst behind his eyes, whole galaxies shimmering and dancing. He can taste the salt on Aziraphale’s skin where he’s sucking bruises over the angel’s collarbone, and feel Aziraphale’s fingers in his hair, and he can feel something else, too. Something deeper, that feels like cool, blessed relief against the charred edges of his soul. 

Crowley shudders, nearly pulling away, but Aziraphale draws him back murmuring, “I feel it, too.”

“It doesn’t burn you?” 

Aziraphale considers. “Not in a bad way. It feels like…” he arches under Crowley, taking more of him and letting his eyes flutter shut. “Like you.”

Crowley decides to take this, and Aziraphale’s increasingly desperate moans of encouragement as proof enough that he isn’t about to incinerate them both. 

He lets himself go, Aziraphale’s arms twining around him and pulling him in. There’s a feeling like the beating of wings, a roaring of wind around them, and a moment when the separation between their two forms feels...less. 

The feeling of tenderness and yearning is back, but now it seems as though it’s coming from inside himself, mingling with his own desperate, covetous _want_. And there’s something else, something like dawning recognition.

It had been very dark, and very bright, all at once.

They’d stood and watched as, for the first time, the constellations pieced themselves together. It was a clumsy process at first, nobody quite sure what they were about, but at last the bears stretched and pawed at the velvety blackness, the lion roared, and a dragon took wing.

“What’s that one there?” Crowley, or, the Crowley-shaped angel, asked, tilting his head and squinting. 

“Capricorn,” said his companion, brightly. “A goat with the tail of a fish, see there? It’s got fins.”

“A goat. With the tail of a fish. That seems a bit unnecessarily confusing for the poor thing, doesn’t it?”

His companion frowned. “Oh, you don’t think...is it? I was just following the blueprints.”

He looked so devastatingly concerned that Crowley’s urge to laugh caught in his throat. “Nah, look. Seems to be doing okay.”

They both watched on in silence for awhile as the constellation managed to get its bearings, figuring out the collective mechanics of hoofs and fins. 

“Got an odd sense of humor, hasn’t she?” Crowley mused.

“Who?”

Crowley raised an eyebrow. “God. Who else?”

“Odd?” His companion looked out over the twinkling star map stretching before them, sighing the contented little sigh of a job well done. “My dear, it’s ineffable.”

Crowley wakes up next to his own body and nearly panics before things start to click into place. 

He feels a lot softer than usual, and more...contained. He stretches experimentally, and waggles plump, manicured fingers in the air over his face. 

Next to him, his own naked body shifts sleepily, rolling over and blinking at him. Crowley can see his own confusion of moments before mirrored in the yellow eyes before Aziraphale pieces it all together. 

“Well,” he says, “I suppose that’s certainly one way to do things.” He raises his hands to inspect them, turning them over and back again, and prodding over his cheeks, tracing the arch of his nose. “Fascinating.”

“That’s one word for it,” Crowley agrees. “Bloody hell, I’m never going to figure out the order to putting on your clothes.”

“No sense rushing the process.” 

Aziraphale leans in and Crowley meets him, reveling silently in the vain, self-indulgent sensation of feeling up his own body. 

“Mmh, careful, don’t want to switch back on accident,” Aziraphale says, muffled against his mouth and doing very little that could be qualified as _careful_.

“Don’t think it’s that simple,” Crowley mumbles. 

“No, I suppose not.”

Crowley moves to kiss him again, but Aziraphale says, “Were you ever going to tell me that you remembered?”

Crowley freezes. He tries to detect any anger or revulsion in the words, but Aziraphale sounds only confused. Maybe a little hurt. 

“There didn’t seem to be much point mentioning it. I didn’t remember much. Just little bits here and there. And you.”

“This whole time?”

Crowley shrugs. “More or less.”

“When you came and found me on the wall at Eden?”

Crowley feels his traitorous cheeks flush. Now _there’s_ something he really hadn’t missed about being an angel. 

“On the wall at Eden, yeah.”

Aziraphale just continues to stare, Crowley’s face gazing back at him and lending a real flair of the surreal to an already implausible situation. 

“You look different.”

“Well spotted.” Crowley smirks in spite of himself, and Aziraphale heaves a sigh. 

“I only meant—”

“I know what you meant,” Crowley says, dismissive. “Never expected you to recognize me. Seemed a bit awkward to bring up, at the time.”

Aziraphale frowns. “Awkward?”

“Oh, you know. After the whole,” Crowley mimes a couple of fingers taking a swan dive off the edge of the bed. “Figured you wouldn’t want to associate yourself.

Aziraphale lapses into silence, just gazing at him. Crowley doubts his face had ever done anything so close to _wistful_ when he’d worn it.

“I missed you, you know,” he says at last, quietly. So quiet that Crowley almost doubts he meant to say the words aloud. “I did wonder. I mean, after that whole horrible business. But we’d been friends. Hadn’t we?”

“Yeah,” said Crowley. “We were.”

“Not that that sort of thing’s ever been strictly encouraged up there, I suppose,” Aziraphale says, almost to himself. He sighs. “All the better things working out like they did, I suppose. Er.”

He casts a nervous glance at Crowley, who shrugs. 

Crowley’s spent millennia sifting detritus out of the rockfall of his memories. He remembers building the night sky. He remembers standing next to Aziraphale watching constellations form and thinking, for the first time, that this must be why God created conflict and pain and choice. Because no one could ever experience a love like this and not feel driven to the brink of destruction by it. 

He hadn’t meant to Fall.

Hadn’t meant to leave.

Hadn’t meant to forget.

But then he’d heard the name and it rang through him like a bell, shaking pebbles loose and sending a cascade of recognition clattering through him and he’d squirmed and clawed and fought his way up toward it. 

They’re here, now. 

And Crowley thinks about what he’s going to do to Hell or Heaven or any misguided soul who tries to get in the way of this again, and he smiles.

“I’d do it all again,” he says. “If you asked me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Just your basic how-can-I-cram-every-single-feeling-into-5000-words idfic, product of a week or so straight of Zolac_No_Miko and I screaming at each other’s DMs. Normal shit. 
> 
> Extra thanks to my wife Floweringjudas for beta, encouragement, and refusing to humor any of my existential meltdowns trying to write multi-dimensional cosmic porn. 
> 
> Title is from Hozier’s “From Eden”.


End file.
